John Battelle brought his first Signal event, Signal LA – The Content Marketing Conversation, to the SLS Beverly Hills Hotel on February 8th.
Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Strong opened the event with a discussion of the just-announced acquisition of The Huffington Post by AOL. Tim noted that “content” has been AOL’s strategy since he arrived 20 months ago. Arianna and her partners agreed to the deal because of the corporate culture match. Huffington Post contains 26 topic areas, and only 15% of their traffic is from political discussions. So it interfingers well with AOL’s topic areas. Mr. Strong said that AOL was attracted to the strong brand of Huffington Post, its extensive social network and reach, and Arrianna’s reputation.
Demand Media’s Chief Revenue Officer, Joanne Bradford, noted that LiveStrong, a site that helps people monitor their diet and caloric intake, gets more traffic than FourSquare.
Twitter founder Buzz Stone said that businesses are now using the service as a hybrid between customer service and marketing. During the recent snow blizzards in the northeast US, Virgin Airlines responded to twitter comments as a key part of their effort to contact and rebook stranded passengers.
When asked what has surprised him most, Buzz’s answer was how quickly companies have flipped from calling twitter “stupid” to calling it “valuable.” It is breaking the veil of secrecy that shrouds the content production process, he said. Twitter is the way for the one quarter of the planet who have access to mobile phones to experience the social aspects of digital communication, since Twitter was originally designed for SMS messaging.
Scott Moore, Execuive Producer at MSN, listed MSN’s five primary focus areas; news, sports, finance, entertainment, and lifestyle. The Huffington Post is the largest distributor of MSN video outside of MSN itself. MSN’s top priority is driving traffic to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Bing has risen from handling 7% to 12% of all search traffic in 18 months. MSN curates Bing’s returns for some of the top query topics.
On the start-up front, serial entrepreneur Keith Richman of Break Media commented that in Silicon Valley people will give you start-up money “just because,” whereas in Los Angeles people want to see a business plan and a defensible path to revenue.
Google has released two sets of open source templates to help developers create web sites that will work well with Google TV products. They use standard web technologies based on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, or optionally Flash. A user interface library has also been released to assist with the development of web sites that can be navigated with a remote control.
The templates are designed to deliver video but are equally suitable for photos or other multimedia. Two sets of templates are provided. One is based on open web technologies. Designed specifically for Google TV, it does not seem to be compatible across all browsers but interestingly it does appear to work reasonably well on an Apple iPad. The other uses Flash and requires Flash Player 10.2, which is currently a release candidate version.
Read the full story here.
(Philip Lelyveld comment: I've been developing a lecture on the dark side of search engines. This editorial came along just in time to give me a much more positive ending to the story.)
In the beginning there was curation, and it was good. People found interesting things on the web, created directories of those things, and then you found what you were looking for inside those curated lists. That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.
But then that got too hard. The web got bigger faster than anyone could keep track. Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords. And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites -- by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough.
That model has now begun to give way too. Any algorithm can be gamed; it's only a matter of time. The Google algorithm is now well and thoroughly gamed...
Google has, they argue, lost its mojo -- which is true, but it's more interesting and complicated than that.
Read the full post here.
BSkyB, the second TV provider in Europe to launch a 3D channel, has scheduled what will be the first opera done in the stereoscopic format. Sky is telecasting Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” live in 3D Feb. 23. The satellite TV provider is collaborating with production company ENO on the project. Sky is calling the telecast the “world’s first quadcast,” because it will be transmitted live on Sky Arts 2 in HD, on Sky 3D and into select U.K. cinemas, as well as on a “deferred relay” in 2D to cinemas around the world.
Original story here
Paramount Pictures is working with a team of 40 student interns from Boston’s Berklee College of Music to create the first full-function database of its immense archive of film music. The online music library database will make it easier for filmmakers and others to access music and obtain rights to music from the Paramount catalog for use across a range of media platforms.
Full story here
Twentieth Century Fox will make Super Bowl history on Sunday when a 30-second spot for 3D toon "Rio" becomes the first ad to air during the game with an embedded code.
During the spot, viewers will be invited to find the frame with the code, which in turns directs them to a special level of Angry Birds, which has entered into a first-of-its kind partnership with Fox. The level will take Angry Birds players to a Rio sweepstakes.
Read the full story here
(Phil Lelyveld comment: this game uses the iphone motion sensors to allow game play in a virtual sphere. It does NOT display in stereoscopic 3D.)
SKY SIEGE 3D in HD – Pushing the boundaries of AR/VR Mobile Gaming! A state of the art update with Gyro, Retina HD, Stereoscopic 3D, RC mode + lots more!
Experience a full on Aerial Assault in Stereoscopic 3D as virtual helicopters come at you from all angles. Choose a spectacular 360 degree Virtual Environment or your own office! Fly a virtual RC helicopter around the room in Augmented Reality!
Watch the YouTube video of the game in action here
Original post here
Quantel has posted an excellent list of 3D channels and their offers, worldwide, on their site here
It’s hard to imagine your career going anywhere if you can’t tell a story. Whether it’s an investor pitch to a VC, an “about us” to a potential customer, justifying your group’s existence to management, or an “about me” in an interview, your success in business is all about effective storytelling.
Read the full story here:
Walt Disney Co. is discussing making video from some of its television networks available on sets embedded with Yahoo Inc.'s Internet-TV software, people familiar with the matter said.
Such new offerings would propel Yahoo into a broader battle to use the Internet to bring premium content to digital TVs, amping up the competition with traditional cable-TV and satellite operators.
...
But TV networks also fear upsetting the traditional TV ecosystem, which generates tens of billions of dollars a year in advertising and cable subscription fees. Several major networks, including Disney's ABC and News Corp.'s Fox Broadcasting, have gone so far as to block users of Google's new Internet-TV service, Google TV, from free episodes that are available on the networks' websites.
...
For Yahoo, Disney is looking to create widgets for its ESPN, ABC, and Disney networks that could pipe video content over the Internet to Yahoo Connected TV sets, the people familiar with the matter said. The widgets haven't been made yet, nor has a final decision been made to use the widgets to transmit video, as opposed to other content, the people said.
...
Yahoo also is wooing advertisers to its TV software. The company said Wednesday that Ford Motor Co., Mattel Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are working with Yahoo on interactive TV commercials so, for example, viewers watching a Lincoln car or Barbie commercial would be prompted to click on a widget for more information and online videos.
...
Read the full story here.
Google has released two sets of open source templates to help developers create web sites that will work well with Google TV products. They use standard web technologies based on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, or optionally Flash. A user interface library has also been released to assist with the development of web sites that can be navigated with a remote control.
BSkyB, the second TV provider in Europe to launch a 3D channel, has scheduled what will be the first opera done in the stereoscopic format. Sky is telecasting Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” live in 3D Feb. 23. The satellite TV provider is collaborating with production company ENO on the project. Sky is calling the telecast the “world’s first quadcast,” because it will be transmitted live on Sky Arts 2 in HD, on Sky 3D and into select U.K. cinemas, as well as on a “deferred relay” in 2D to cinemas around the world.
SKY SIEGE 3D in HD – Pushing the boundaries of AR/VR Mobile Gaming! A state of the art update with Gyro, Retina HD, Stereoscopic 3D, RC mode + lots more!